spit and polish

Got me a new skin for my weblog today, and mopped the floor in the front room of my house. Spiffy!

My new violin arrived yesterday; I fiddled around with it (no pun intended) for a while, getting the bridge set up, strings tightened up to something approaching where I thought they belonged. Then I decided to go to Barnes & Noble for a book on the violin.

It should be noted here that I've never played the violin before, nor have I ever used a bow on a musical instrument - only to shoot arrows. I've played guitar and bass for nearly 25 years, and have played an upright bass a few times, but this little violin thang is SMALL. It's like it wasn't even meant for adult fingers.

Back to the Barnes & Noble adventure. So I go in there, armed with my Compulsive Reader's Advantage card so I can get a discount (of course); quick pit stop in the computer section to get a book on HTML - from O'Reilly, of course - then over to American History (I never, ever walk out of BN with only the book I came in for) where I grabbed Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" and the "Federalist Papers." Timely reading.

Time to find something on violins. I wanted an instructional book, but I also needed to know the mechanical details of the instrument; where to place the bridge, what the basic tuning is, bow tension, etc.

I locate the music section. Guitar this, guitar that, electric bass, piano, keyboards, How To Market Your Band, all of this out the yin-yang, but that's all. I begin to look very carefully at every single book spine, no matter how slim; OK, here's a few on the harmonica - with harmonica attached to a couple of them - there was even one on the clavichord. Nothing on the violin.

Finally, I found a book with 100 selections of sheet music for the violin; I grabbed that, as I have many of the classical pieces in that book in my CD collection. Near that book, I found the only other book on the violin, Mel Bay's (remember Mel Bay's books?) "You Can Teach Yourself Fiddling." I couldn't resist. Not only did it have a goofy cartoon hoe-down on the cover, but it also had some of the technical data I wanted, and teaches by the "tablature" method rather than by note-reading. I can read music, but not quickly, and until I am familiar with the instrument reading won't help anyway.